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I found myself real­ly enjoy­ing this book, which is first in the sto­ry chronol­ogy of the Nar­nia books, but the last to be writ­ten. Last month, I read a biog­ra­phy of C. S. Lewis, and the man’s per­sonal life was fresh in my mind. One thing is clear: Lewis despised and resent­ed the British class sys­tem as much as George Orwell did, and it comes across strong­ly in this book. He also shared Orwell’s hatred for his Pub­lic School expe­ri­ence. In the char­ac­ter of the Magi­cian, who is mer­ci­lessly flayed with sharp lit­tle razor-cuts that a child can eas­ily decode, he demon­strates his loathing for the amoral tech­nocrats whom he obvi­ously felt were tak­ing over the world. Lewis and Orwell form an inter­est­ing pair to com­pare. They both wrote scathing denun­ci­a­tions of total­i­tar­i­an­ism, both in adult sci­ence fic­tion and children’s fan­tasy. Yet, by the ide­o­log­i­cal con­ven­tions of the time, they were sup­posed to be ene­mies of each oth­er. Orwell wrote rather snide­ly of Lewis’s radio broad­casts. How­ever, they pret­ty much feared and opposed the same things. Where Orwell thought he could fight those things with per­sonal hon­esty and a humane, sec­u­lar, demo­c­ra­tic social­ism, Lewis some­how man­aged to see the same val­ues in a kind of car­toon ver­sion of the Church of Eng­land. His ver­sion of Protes­tant Chris­tian­ity will be rather hard for fun­da­men­tal­ist protes­tants in the Unit­ed States to deal with, if they exam­ine it close­ly, and I won’t be sur­prised if the Nar­nia films end up caus­ing con­fu­sion and dis­ar­ray among them. Those raised in the easy-going protes­tant church­es that dom­i­nate in Cana­da will feel more at home with it.

The series as a whole shifts in sen­ti­ment and style from one vol­ume to anoth­er. One thing I noticed is that, as he puts basic ideas of Chris­tian­ity into the form of a fable, the very process of doing so brings out the log­i­cal prob­lems inher­ent in those beliefs. Is Aslan the one deity, the shad­ow of a deity, or mere­ly the agent of a deity? If Aslan has all this pow­er, why does he seem to use it so incon­sis­tently and capri­ciously? Why, in fact, is the White Queen able to get away with any of her dirty deeds if she is not a pow­er in some way com­pa­ra­ble to the good pow­er? The implied solu­tions in the fan­tasy are def­i­nitely not ortho­dox Chris­t­ian doc­trine. It would be impos­si­ble to make sat­is­fy­ing fan­tasy fic­tion of any that were. Lewis would almost cer­tainly have found him­self burned as a heretic in any world actu­ally con­trolled by the Church that held his alle­giance. In this, he is like most lit­er­ary con­verts to some tra­di­tional faith. Lewis was an ardent non-believ­er and cyn­i­cal “ratio­nal­ist” for the first half of his life, of pre­cisely the kind that you just know is head­ed for con­ver­sion to piety. But such types almost always end up writ­ing up a faith of doubt­ful ortho­doxy, no mat­ter how des­per­ately they want to belong to what they pre­vi­ously despised and now embrace.